06 October 2005

some final ambivalence

The Evil Librarian is gone – and this is the voice of the real author of this blog. I am announcing that I will be retiring this ambivalenz.net blog. I won’t be deleting it, but I doubt that I will be updating in the future. I probably won’t renew the ambivalenz.net domain when it expires.

Why? This blog has been fun and has been an interesting creative outlet for me. The main reason is that for the time being, I think that this such a blog can only thrive for me if it’s truly anonymous. Unsurprisingly, I’m ambivalent about anonymous and pseudonymous blogs. Anonymous blogging has the potential to inflict an enormous amount of harm in the world, because there is no accountability. On the other hand, named bloggers can cause harm to themselves by baring their soul to anybody who happens to google them – it’s the Too Much Information factor.

I think that sometimes anonymous blogging is advisable, and other times, it is better to be a named blogger. This is not a rule of thumb and there will always be exceptions, but for me, if you are making a point of engaging with other people and their opinions, it is better to be a named blogger. If you engaging and exploring your own life and imagination, it is safer to be an anonymous blogger. I am not a fan of dichotomies such as this inward/outward dichotomy, and there will always be people and blogs who won't fit easily on either side of this line, but this idea seems to work for me.

So I am closing this blog, but expect to be reincarnating its spirit elsewhere in the web, anonymously.

music I'm blogging to

A kick in the teethFischerspooner: OdysseyA great album which I very nearly didn't buy because of its copy protection which made it unplayable on my Mac. I don't subscribe to the theory that copy protected works should be boycotted. I'd rather circumvent and enjoy.